Time Vs Gold

Time Vs Gold

Which do you value more?

So i decided to level up another alchemist and im not short of a few bob so i bought most of the mats in the ah even though i knew most of the mats were valued at over inflated prices and i easily couldve just farmed the mats myself

but the way i see it i couldve earned more by quickly leveling up my new alchemist and spent the remainder of my time doing something else which is more profitable than wasting 30 mins farming goldthorn etc

so the point is do you value your gold more than your time or is your time more precious cause you can spend that time doing more profitable things

Sometimes I'm happily watching TV and will go and farm the herbs/minerals/whatever. At other times I've got other things I'd rather be doing so I just buy the materials.

Generally speaking, if something is 25-50% of the price of the current level primary mat stack price I'm likely to buy it automatically (e.g. Peacebloom = 5g per stack & Green Tea Leaf = 20g per stack, then I'd be likely to buy the Peacebloom & farm Green Tea Leaf to sell if I want my gold back). If something is within 10-20% of the easily farmable+sellable product in that category, or more expensive than it, then I'm much more likely to farm it. But that's a general principle that's highly variable based on what I feel like doing in-game.

I also value gold enough to wait at times. e.g. Serpent's Eyes are generally 5-10g range on my server.. someone recently pushed the price up to 25g... in the last day or two it's come back down to 18g, and I'm happy to wait for it to come back down further. They're only for an alt anyway.. the price is not an issue - I just don't like being gouged & I don't need it, so I won't be.

Thats all a bit simplistic. Certain things you will pay the price for becayse of convenience and longer term profitability and other things you will farm yourself. It varies from one thing to another. the emphasis on people who accymylate gold is to onlly buy where its too much of a paon or doesnt make sense not to otherwise gold tends to remain in my bank. You cna still seek good value for money though.

Really depends on how much do the items cost and how fast can I get that amount of money. When leveling a profession on an alt I'll buy all low level mats because even when they are overpriced by 100% or more they just cost a couple of golds per stack and by doing some dailies I'll have the gold back. So it's farm for 30-60 minutes or do a set of dailies in 5 minutes?

I guess for me time is more important and I'll only farm if it's faster to farm for myself than getting gold to buy stuff from the AH.

I did the same about a week ago, dropped herbalism on a character I wasn't really playing anymore to make another alchemist. This one is elixir spec, in the week hes been 600 alchemy I've doubled the money I spent buying over priced mats on the AH. And I sold the leftover mats I didn't use at the same inflated prices.

Originally Posted by Aurust

I visualized playing it in my head and it was bad.

Originally Posted by Nathane

I mean you have all the trademarks of one childish, ignorant, irresponsible, retarded.

Remember, time is money. If you can make 1k gold per hour doing whatever you do when you want to make gold and you see something on the AH for 200g that would take you 30 minutes to farm if you didn't buy it, it makes more sense to buy the item. This way, you can spend those 30 minutes farming gold efficiently and end up with 500g. This is why many people buy gold. If they make $20 an hour, it would be more efficient to just buy the gold instead of farming it if, for instance, gold was going for one dollar per 1k. Why spend 20 hours farming 20k gold when you can work for 20 hours and earn enough money to buy 400k gold?

Remember, time is money. If you can make 1k gold per hour doing whatever you do when you want to make gold and you see something on the AH for 200g that would take you 30 minutes to farm if you didn't buy it, it makes more sense to buy the item. This way, you can spend those 30 minutes farming gold efficiently and end up with 500g. This is why many people buy gold. If they make $20 an hour, it would be more efficient to just buy the gold instead of farming it if, for instance, gold was going for one dollar per 1k. Why spend 20 hours farming 20k gold when you can work for 20 hours and earn enough money to buy 400k gold?

It doesn't stop people from doing it, I remember a friend of mine in RuneScape got a job just because making $8/hr was way better then making 4m/hr. gold there at the time was .50/mil so he was making 4x as much money compared to the person killing the highest level boss in game over and over.

Back on topic.

I currently value my time more so I'll go out and buy all my mats. When I want to make money I'll focus on that. Sometimes I look at it this way. Can I make 3k gold/hr farming the mats I want? If I can't I stick to whatever it is I do to make 3k gold/hr and buy what I need.

Last edited by Rezinol; 2012-12-03 at 01:27 AM.
Reason: Didn't get the quote in.

I generally avoid mind-numbing tasks like flying in circles across the map farming nodes for hours, but my money is limited so I can't buy 100% mats off the AH and especially when they're overpriced. So that leads me to mind-numbing farming even though my playtime is very valuable (only a 1-2 hours each day after work)

Hard question. I have pretty much unlimited time to sink into WoW, but I abhore farming mats. It's just the dullest mindnumbing thing to me. So my point is usually that I can make more gold doing what I like doing (or don't mind) like for instance prospecting ore for gems and checking and crafting the cuts I need and putting in some time logging between chars to frequently relist them, then I would save by farming some material or item I need for the same time.

It's not so much a question of time or gold, it's mostly a question of efficiency for me. If I can get an item faster then I can make the gold I go get the item, if not, I just make gold in a way I find fun and then buy it. In my opinion it's the superior way, cause I get to do what I find fun (JC) while someone else gets gold for doing what they find fun (getting (low level) mats or items)

There's cases where I will go out of my way to farm something myself though if I think someone is price gouging. I know the serious traders on my realm, and the names of the people that will often buy out bottleneck materials and try to gouge through controlling the market, and I usually don't play along, but either farm my own mats OR find a way around the bottleneck. We had a guy control the Fel iron & cobalt ore prices for a while, and he drove the price up to 5g, and kept buying out lower priced ore. Yeah, not buying that tyvm. So I went and farmed my own Fel Iron & Cobalt & saronite I needed for Engineering. In this case my annoyance with this guy was big enough to help me through an hour or 3 of boring farming.

Time for me. Just to give you an example I activated a 10 day MOP trial. I had about 1500 gold to my account in total spread among all my toons. My professions were a mix bag. Some toons had professions that were maxed out at 525 and others not so much. My main luckily was maxed out on all of his so I went through Jade Forest through him. The money I got from questing I sent to my Shammy who's professions needed a lot of work. I spent about 2-3k just to get him over 500 skill which is the minimum that MOP starts awarding skill ups for. Nearly broke I went through Jade Forest with him and gave all the money to my mage and got him all fixed up. Once my mage is done I'll send everything to my priest and get him going and then it's on to my warlock.

Everyone will say Time > Gold. At some stage Gold > Time otherwise why spend time making it? This is especially so for people who want to try and accumulate gold.
Gold and making it is an important aspect of wow that enables players to function more effectively and to stand out from the general population.

You can't compare time and gold as mutually traded commodities. Time's value is static and Golds value goes up and down based on the markets. Time is the factor that decides the value of an endeavor that results in gold.

For example I could spend 2 hours doing dailies for 20 gold each and come up with 600 gold which means my 1 hour of work =300 gold.
I could also spend those two hours farming and I can come up with 1,000 pieces of cloth, 15 green items that sell for 100 each on AH, some ores and other items, then turn the cloth into bolts and bags netting a grand profit of 4000 gold which means that 1 hour of work =2000 gold.

Its the same amount of time but I make more gold per hour doing the cloth farming than I do the dailies farming so I do the one that nets more in that hour than the other.

So I can mine ore for an hour and sell it for 500 gold or I can convert the ore in gems and PVP armor and make 5,000 gold, How I spend the hour determines which gold making process I use. If he ore was more valuable than the finished product then I would just sell the ore.

I am going to invest time in the game regardless, the trick is squeezing as much gold out of every minute I invest in the game for the purpose of making gold profits.

The value of time is absolutely not static. When I am gearing up a brand new toon to try and be raid ready next week, time in game is very precious. If it's the end of an expansion and there's nothing to do but wait...well, you get the idea I hope.